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What is so special about embodied simulation?

2011; Elsevier BV; Volume: 15; Issue: 11 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1016/j.tics.2011.09.003

1879-307X

Vittorio Gallese, Corrado Sinigaglia,

Embodied and Extended Cognition

Simulation theories of social cognition abound in the literature, but it is often unclear what simulation means and how it works. The discovery of mirror neurons, responding both to action execution and observation, suggested an embodied approach to mental simulation. Over the past few years this approach has been hotly debated and alternative accounts have been proposed. We discuss these accounts and argue that they fail to capture the uniqueness of embodied simulation (ES). ES theory provides a unitary account of basic social cognition, demonstrating that people reuse their own mental states or processes represented with a bodily format in functionally attributing them to others. Simulation theories of social cognition abound in the literature, but it is often unclear what simulation means and how it works. The discovery of mirror neurons, responding both to action execution and observation, suggested an embodied approach to mental simulation. Over the past few years this approach has been hotly debated and alternative accounts have been proposed. We discuss these accounts and argue that they fail to capture the uniqueness of embodied simulation (ES). ES theory provides a unitary account of basic social cognition, demonstrating that people reuse their own mental states or processes represented with a bodily format in functionally attributing them to others. according to its advocates in philosophy of mind and cognitive neuroscience, this notion usually means that many features of cognition are causally or even constitutively related to the physical body and the bodily actions of an agent. It is still controversial whether and to what extent embodied cognition exploits mental representations. mind-reading is usually conceived of as the attribution or ascription of a mental state to self or other. The nature of this attribution or ascription is a matter of debate. Similarly debated is whether the representations involved should be propositional only or could instead allow other formats, such as a bodily one. this mechanism, given the present state of knowledge, maps the sensory representation of the action, emotion or sensation of another onto the perceiver's own motor, viscero-motor or somatosensory representation of that action, emotion or sensation. This mapping enables one to perceive the action, emotion or sensation of another as if she were performing that action or experiencing that emotion or sensation herself. the notion of simulation is employed in many different domains, often with different, non-overlapping meanings. Simulation is a functional process that possesses a certain representational content, typically focusing on possible states of its target object. Motor control theory characterizes simulation as the mechanism employed by forward models to predict the sensory consequences of impending actions. In philosophy of mind the notion of simulation has been used to characterize the production of pretend mental states that match the mental states of others as closely as possible to enable mind-reading.